Thursday, 19 January 2012

Ooglie Booglie Part II and Possible Flood

Who after reading the last post thought I was a bit special booglying everything? Well guess what? Later, after posting that, Zappa got right into it and went more nuts than me!

The next day Zappa was working doing some garden work for some friends, but it started throwing it down with rain, so I went to pick him up after an hour or so. He’d had an idea the night before about painting a massive map of Australia on the wall, which I liked but didn’t take seriously as he’d had a few drinks and had also decided he was going to become a kung fu pro. However, there we were stuck in the house in a deluge with Zappa’s newfound free time, and he suggested we actually do it.

We went into town to get supplies – multiple big sheets of card we stuck together, paint and a map. We decided to stick to New South Wales as that’s realistically where we’ll probably stick to. And it was really fun! Apart from the geography exercise at the start, drawing gridlines and scaling things up and down. I made myself fired from that job. Painting with a big brush with big strokes is fun. I did the land and Zappa did the sea, and you can tell because the sea is immaculately blue and the land is like blerrgghhh.

We’re going to stick things on where we want to go and things we want to do, like stick surfboards on good-sounding beaches, and tents on possible campsites, and colour them in once we’ve done them. All the maps with that sort of information on them have been area map type things, and it gets really frustrating not being able to see the bigger picture of where everything is in relation to each other, so that you can plan a whole route.

Onto the Possible Flood! It has been deluging down for the last few days, and the river has got all fat and big, and is rather close to the underside of the bridge today. This is the river normally:

And this is it currently:

Well that really doesn't do it justice as it was taken in the car, but it's pretty full.

It’s not uncommon for the river to flood in the rainy season, and one half of Bellingen is completely cut off from the other. It’s not like Somerset floods, where there’s suddenly a soggy lake where a field used to be and you can go and take arty photos of reflections, here there’s a raging monster that flings big trees and dead cows down its torrent self, and you’re not allowed anywhere near it.

So in preparation for the Possibility, we have developed what my mum calls Siege Mentality (she usually uses it in a Christmas context), and today I went and bought up loads of food, including a tin of butter beans, which weren’t on the list but seemed like the sort of thing when you’re marooned you might end up eating. Damn, now I’ve remembered Winnie the Pooh’s tactics when he was flooded in. I should have got lots of jars of honey. I’m such an amateur.